Bjarne Stroustrup on the Problems With Programming

Hobart writes "MIT's Technology Review has a Q&A with C++ inventor Bjarne Stroustrup. Highlights include Bjarne's answers on the trade-offs involved in the design of C++, and how they apply today, and his thoughts on the solution to the problems. From the interview: 'Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it.'"

Comments

Re:In my experience...

[bogaboga]

In my case, we were presented with a problem and asked to "produce" a possible solution in a month. From the tools we had, VB was the most obvious. No body dictated what we should be using in our solutions.

With a little research, nothing could beat MS-Access with its VB. We quickly had working GUIs integrated with business logic. Things were beautiful. PHP was available but the its abilities at the time were very limited.

Sadly, there is still no real answer to MS-Access' programming paradigm in the Linux world. Gambas http://gambas.sourceforge.net/ comes close. So does RealBasic http://www.realbasic.com/. Other wannabe environments are simply wasting time at present, and do not appear to be serious.

I am meant to understand that Kross http://conference2006.kde.org/conference/talks/2.p hp is progressing well, but was not impressed when I tried it.

Having powerful programming environments that are friendly to newbies is OK, but making them actively hostile to power users on the other hand is insane. Those two items aren't mutually exclusive, but Linux programmers tend to think so - sadly.

He summarizes one of the big issues in SD now...

[Bamafan77]

From the article:

TR: How can we fix the mess we are in?

BS: In theory, the answer is simple: educate our software developers better, use more-appropriate design methods, and design for flexibility and for the long haul. Reward correct, solid, and safe systems. Punish sloppiness.

In reality, that's impossible. People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That's because people want fancy new gadgets now. They don't want inconvenience, don't want to learn new ways of interacting with their computers, don't want delays in delivery, and don't want to pay extra for quality (unless it's obvious up front--and often not even then). And without real changes in user behavior, software suppliers are unlikely to change.

There ya go! Time pressures and price are fundamentally incompatable with code quality, even amongst the best programmers. Ergo, great programming is incompatible with most business models (i.e., most businesses don't have the money to make the software they want at the quality they want). It's sort of like wanting a Ferrari, but only having enough money to buy Gremlin. Sadly, many (most?) programming projects are nothing more than an arms race between getting something out the door that hangs together reasonably well and the bottom of the client's bank accounts.

The good thing about working in software-centric companies (besides understanding the programmer psyche) is that they often don't balk as much at being told something can't be done in a timeframe. Blizzard doesn't blink an eye when it has to delay a game by a year (probably more like 2 or 3 years when compared to internal, non-public set dates). Microsoft finally decided to nuke WinFS once they finally conceded that you're not going to get it within this decade, no matter how much they throw chairs. Google apparently has almost no schedules.

Re:Problems with Programming

[QuantumG]

Some say C++ didn't go far enough, in that you can't define arbitary operators. As such, you have a small limited number to choose from and therefore overloading is all you can do. I'd love to be able to define an operator like .= to do string concatenation, but I can't, so I use += and live with the confusion and possible errors that causes.

Agreed...

[Bamafan77]

Maybe it's because the average programmer is enslaved in company business. They don't have the time to create masterpieces or art in programming. Instead of that they are forced to create something adequate in a given time. Happens almost everytime, when science becomes business. I don't like that, you don't like that, no one likes that, but that's the way commercial industries are working (at the moment).

Agreed, but the problem is complicated. Sometimes code is bad because the programmer is not very good (vast majority of cases). Other times it's bad because a good programmer wasn't given enough time to do that job. I once inhereted something where a customer wasn't happy with a product and I pulled open the hood expecting a mess. Instead what I got was extremely well documented code explaining the layout, sanely named variables, and some fairly complicated things happening in an understandable manner. The guy who I got this from was a very good programmer (heh, how often does THAT happen?!). Then it occured to me that the customer simply wanted the impossible done.

Anyway, the typical unsophsticated (software development-wise) customer can't tell the difference between the two. This is made worse when many managers who were supposedly professional programmers themselves can't tell the difference. As far as I can tell, the only way for a programmer to deal with this is to simply BE great and be ready to move on if the customer can't see that greatness. Eventually they'll get somewhere that will appreciate it.

I also cover some of this in another reply.

Re:In my experience...

[sgt101]

The languages students need to study are :

Prolog
Miranda/SML/Haskell
Java/C++/C#/Smalltalk/any other imperative with OO

Because these show the different choices in representation that programmers essentially have : declarative, functional, imperative (scripts). OO is a useful concept to describe to students because it gets them used to the ideas of abstraction and forces good programming practice like information hiding.

Later on it would be good if Universities taught web development (Php for example) and database development (SQL, possibly microsoft tools).

Interestingly universities do not teach, and I think rightly, the most common activity that CS grads end up doing in the real world, which is installation, integration, customisation and configuration of COTS products like CRM systems.